10 Facts about the Milky Way Emalee Couture 9/18/15 1 It's warped The Milky Way is a disk that measures about 1,000 light years across, with a central bulge that has a diameter of about 12,000 light years The disk is not perfectly flat though, it is warped due to our neighboring galaxies Large andThe spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largestknown spiral, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which has since been loaned to the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CalifThe spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largestknown spiral, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which has since been loaned